12 Days of Inkmas: Kyo-no-oto #6 Adzukiiro

Kyo-no-oto #6 Adzukiiro ($28 for 40ml bottle)! Yes. There is are NEW Kyo-no-oto colors and my own personal ink fairy made sure I got a sample of it ASAP.

Like all of the previous Ky-no-oto ink colors, this is a muted yet rich color. It’s a sophisticated brick red. There is an ever-so-slight undertone of pink but the overall quality of this color is much more ruddy. It’s a red-burgundy but not pinky at all, I promise. My photos may have skewed cooler than intended.

There is some shading in the ink and Kyo-no-oto is a bit drier ink than others. It almost feels sandy to me which works well, especially on less agreeable papers though in some fine Japanese nibs you may have issues with hard starts. The advantages of the softer, more sophisticated colors and the ink that sits up on the page might be worth keeping some scrap paper for priming your pen every now and again.

I tend to convince people to buy at least one bottle of Kyo-no-oto. For the bottle alone, because I think the bottles are beautiful in their simplicity. It’s the only ink bottle I have on my desk at work. So, if this color speaks to you or you think it would make a great gift, I say buy it.

I had a swatch of Red Dragon too but found it to be too deep to be a good comparison. But it was close. I think Adzukiiro is more orange-y where Red Dragon has more of a red-black quality. Its so hard to quantify. And some of these colors, it’s easier to see the color differences in large swatches than it is once they are in a pen, especially finer nibs.